For two hours on May 28 you could have spent £750 on a special, limited edition of The Devil May Care, the new James Bond Novel written by Sebastian Faulks. Published by Penguin in collaboration with Bentley, Bond’s car manufacturer of choice, each book comes in a burnt oak leather case sourced from the tannery in Italy which supplies the hides for Bentley’s interiors. Purchasers also receive a 1:43 scale replica of the modified Bentley R type that featured in Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (The car never actually existed but Bentley based the miniatures on Fleming’s detailed descriptions.)

“Beginn-or-oh-seven Collectors” mostly own a handful of gadget assembled by some Q’s purvey of some DVDs or other gifts. They never thought to collect Mr. Bond. These chaps, and more rarely (okay, much more rarely, chapettes) come home pie-eyed from visiting an experienced collector or checking on thousands of Bond items now on eBay. Once “bitten by the bug,” as Bruce Glover stated in Diamonds Are Forever, even newbies quickly graduate to full-fledged Fleming freaks and boffo (sometimes boorish, but bold) Bond buffs.

I recently re-watched North By Northwest. Loved it, and you may be saying “of course,” but this is the second time I’ve seen it and the first time I’ve loved it. Several years ago, I went through a Hitchcock phase that kind of turned on me. I was watching quite a lot of Hitch, and […]